2014 Marine Aggregation: Expanding Our Practice Sessions

Topics and approaches that stretch broadly across our
strategies for marine conservation and have been identified as important learning
opportunities to advance marine conservation, including: communications,
sustainable finance mechanisms, working in whole systems, successful strategy
design and new conservation challenges on the horizon.

Description: Participants discussed the newly launched effort to bring Conservation by Design into a human-dominated world. In 1995, The Nature Conservancy adopted “Conservation by Design” as its framework for setting conservation priorities and advancing strategies. The consistency and clarity of the approach brought great credibility to our work and led to uptake well beyond our own projects. Much has since changed. We now have much greater understanding of the magnitude of human impacts on the natural world, and how “traditional” approaches alone (e.g., protecting “the last great places”) will fall short of the conservation called for in the Conservancy’s mission. The Global Challenges/Global Solutions framework captures the need for approaches that drive systemic change for nature and people. And, advances in the scientific community provide a rich, new set of tools we can bring to bear on these efforts. The refresh of Conservation by Design will incorporate these advances, and better support and empower Conservancy teams to have impact in their work. Resources:Session Summary

ExPract 2: Show Me the Money: Financing Marine Conservation

Presenters: Andrew Soles, Trina Leberer, Robert Weary, Bill Ginn.

Description: You’ve perhaps heard the rhetoric “TNC’s staff are experts at bringing innovative financial approaches to conservation”. Is it true? In this session, participants heard from a range of sustainable finance mechanisms being used and explored by the Conservancy and explored potential financing ideas that might be appropriate for marine conservation projects. Resources:Session Summary | Graphic Facilitation Drawing

ExpPract 3: Stepping Off the Deep End: Strategies to Build a Successful Project

Description: This interactive session was designed for staff to learn from each other and to deliver concrete information on how to build a project framework that sets you up for success, regardless of the project size or your experience. Are you new to designing and leading projects? Have you been tapped to lead a bigger, maybe ‘scarier-scale’ project? How do you start a project from the ground floor? Do you have low capacity? When do you bring in partners and which ones? The steps and challenges are similar whether you are new or an old hat and the projects are large or small. We encouraged project managers with any level of experience share challenges and successes in developing and managing successful projects. Resources:

Description: Oftentimes, our work reaches across not only marine strategies, but also interfaces with a range of other objectives stemming from terrestrial and watershed conservation, social and economic needs and other aspects. In this session, participants shared examples of what whole system work necessary to achieve coastal and marine conservation looks like. Participants explored lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid; success strategies for working in whole systems for marine; and use of conservation planning to develop information underpinnings for informed strategy development and decision-making.Resources:

Description: In this session we will heard TNC staff describe how they have explored some of our ocean’s most pressing challenges (for people and nature) such as aquaculture, water quality, and fisheries vulnerability due to climate change. These were all discussed as examples of challenges on the horizon that could have enormous consequences for marine conservation if ignored. Participants gave suggestions on how to move forward on these and other large scale issues so that TNC can become a more proactive marine conservation organization.

ExpPract 6: Communications IS Part of Your Conservation Strategy

Description: Communications can make or break our work. Unfortunately, we often don’t take the time, or consider the need, to think about how to communicate about our projects until the actual work is done, or the grant is written. Communication becomes an afterthought to conservation when it should be part of the foundation of our work. In this session we will examined how and why thoughtful communication is fundamental to conservation success, how to work with resources that are available, and explored a framework for how to develop a communications strategy in the absence of dedicated staff support (identifying your audiences, asking the right questions, developing messaging and more). We also shared examples of communication partnerships and strategies that have been successfully implemented.